The last week of the Believe series: breakfast on the… read more

Adam names the animals and the process establishes something: no suitable helper was found. Pastor Adam treats the naming as a survey returning a negative result, and the absence as something God intended him to notice first.

Four sentences that have carried an enormous amount of argument. Pastor Adam lands on a deliberately balanced formulation — equal but not the same, equal but not interchangeable — and distinguishes the structural calling of Genesis 1 from the relational one in Genesis 2.

David runs, and Pastor Adam argues it is the most competent thing he does in the whole account. He sends the ark back rather than use the presence of God as insurance, and answers betrayal with one sentence of prayer rather than a counter-plot.

Rondi Pogue, who directs a ministry working in conferences, India and the local jails, preaches on the question her work puts her in front of constantly: am I bad? The distinction the message rests on is shame as a claim about what a person is.

Nathan tells a story about a stolen lamb and David pronounces sentence on the man who did it. Pastor Adam notices that David’s moral judgment is working perfectly — it is simply not pointed at himself — and that the parable is a mirror held at the one unavoidable angle.

Pastor Adam spends a whole message on Bathsheba before returning to David, noting the text never blames her and that Matthew’s genealogy declines her name, calling her the one who had been the wife of Uriah, keeping the wrong in view generations later.

A joyful crowd, genuinely mistaken about what it is celebrating. Pastor Adam preaches Palm Sunday as a warning that popularity is evidence of nothing in either direction, and that what the road wanted was a political saviour rather than a universal king.

Two men present a severed head as good news and David has them executed. Pastor Adam uses the scene to address the wrath of God, distinguishing a response against what violates God’s nature from the capricious, self-indulgent human version.